The Greens Want to Save Australia's Gaming Industry

An election promise from the Greens would resurrect Australia’s flailing gaming industry, with the party announcing an $100 million investment fund to support local developers as part of their campaign for the swing seat of Batman in Melbourne’s inner north.

You couldn’t find a more crowd pleasing election promise: Australians love to game, spending $3.23 billion on gaming in 2017 alone. That’s almost a ten percent increase on 2016’s spending.

But even though gaming is lucrative—globally the market is valued in the tens of billions of dollars—Australia’s local industry has actually gone backwards in the past decade due to high labour and production costs. Since the early 2010s, most well-known local studios have either shut down or abandoned Australia to set up shop in countries like Canada, where governments subsidise game production.

Back in 2012, the Labor government pledged a $20 million industry assistance fund for Australian developers—but the Abbott government abolished said fund in 2014. Since then, local publishers have struggled, although independent developers have found some success making mobile games with lower production costs.

“For a government so concerned with selling the message of innovation, it is deeply hypocritical to continue to ignore the creative, cultural, and economic contributions of the video games industry," Greens Senator Jordon Steele-John said in a media release.

“Video games are culturally, artistically and economically significant… the Australian Greens see video games as a key component in rebooting our digital future.”

The Batman by-election takes place on March 17. If Greens candidate Alex Bhathal succeeds, the party will have two lower house seats in Federal Parliament.